Hucksters know more and something different from what they’re telling their potential buyers. Hucksters do great infomercials. Don King is a huckster. Managers for professional wrestlers, certain evangelical preachers, (Swaggart, Hagee, Haggard) – are all hucksters. They sell hollow products by agitating false needs and cruelly exploiting genuine ones.
Tehran, Jan. 26: One of Iran’s top nuclear scientists, Ardeshir Hassanpour, a professor at the University of Shiraz, has died under mysterious circumstances.
Hassanpour’s death was announced by Iranian state television, a week late, on Thursday.
No reason was given for his death. The scientist was proclaimed the best scientist in the military field in the Islamic Republic in 2003. Hassanpour directed the centre for nuclear electromagnetic studies he had ... (more)
DAVID Hicks is spending 22 hours a day in "nightmarish" isolation in conditions described by Guantanamo Bay inmates as "a dungeon above the ground", court documents suggest.
Fresh evidence about the treatment of prisoners in the US military base has been revealed amid deepening concerns about the Australian terrorist suspect's mental state, and just days before Hicks receives a visit from his Australian lawyer.
Conditions inside Hicks' cell block at the naval base i... (more)
“This is how the 1975-90 conflict began in Lebanon. Outbreaks of sectarian hatred, appeals for restraint, promises of aid from Western and Arab nations and a total refusal to understand that this is how civil wars begin”.
Robert Fisk, “World ignores Signs of Civil War in Lebanon” UK Independent 1-27-07
Robert Fisk is all wrong about Lebanon. The country is not on the brink of another “civil war”. It's been subsumed in an &... (more)
More than half a million people had signed a petition calling for the Government to scrap plans for pay-as-you-drive road pricing last night as it emerged that the European Union is about to cash in on the scheme.
With less than a month before the petition is taken down from the Downing Street website, the latest predictions are suggesting that around 750,000 will back the campaign started by Peter Roberts, an account executive from Telford, Shropshire. L... (more)
Corrupt police and tribal leaders are stealing vast quantities of reconstruction aid that is intended to improve the lives of ordinary Afghans and turn them away from the Taliban, The Sunday Telegraph has learnt.
In some cases, all the aid earmarked for an area has ended up in the wrong hands. Defence officials in the United States and Britain estimate that up to half of all aid in Afghanistan is failing to reach the right people.
Actor Sean Penn summed up the new energy -- and the new focus -- of the anti-war movement Saturday, when he turned George Bush's own words against the president.
Just hours after the president had again reasserted his false claim to authority to pursue a war that is not wanted by the American people or the Congress, Penn told anti-war demonstrators gathered in Washington that Bush would be wise to review the Constitution.
"In a democracy," the actor told the cheerin... (more)
I would like to bring your attention to a story I covered last August about 1st Lt. Ehren Watada. The story covered his decision not to deploy to Iraq and a speech he gave at the Veteran's for Peace National Convention in Seattle last August. The full text of his speech can be read here
In the weeks following that speech, I was contacted by the prosecuting attorney from his court-martial an... (more)
The Bush administration has employed extraordinary secrecy in defending the National Security Agency’s highly classified domestic surveillance program from civil lawsuits. Plaintiffs and judges’ clerks cannot see its secret filings. Judges have to make appointments to review them and are not allowed to keep copies.
Judges have even been instructed to use computers provided by the Justice Department to compose their decisions.
'We're selling pets. No one will target us,' merchants told a policeman before a bombing that killed 15 people and injured 51. Many of the patrons were children, at least one of whom died.
BAGHDAD — The police officer warned them to spread out. Now was not the time to cluster around one another so closely. But he didn't press too hard before he moved along. In this time of war and misery, police officer Sabah Shayal admitted, it heartened him to see so many people gathering ... (more)
Detectives have discovered a hand-written note from Tony Blair among new evidence that has widened significantly the cash-for-honours investigation.
It is the first time that the "paper trail" uncovered by Scotland Yard has led directly to the Prime Minister. The note is understood to acknowledge the efforts of Labour's 12 secret lenders who provided £14 million to help the party fight the 2005 election.
An Iranian nuclear official has rejected a statement by a Tehran MP who said Iran had begun installing 3,000 new atomic centrifuges for uranium enrichment.
Hossein Simorgh, the head of public affairs at Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation, said on Saturday that no such new devices had been fitted at its Natanz uranium enrichment facility.
Alaeddin Boroujerdi, head of parliament's foreign affairs and national security committee, had earlier been quoted as saying Iran... (more)
Australian toll road giant Macquarie agreed Wednesday to purchase forty local newspapers, primarily in Texas and Oklahoma, for $80 million. Macquarie Bank is Australia's largest capital raising firm and has invested billions in purchasing roads in the US, Canada and UK. Most recently the company joined with Cintra Concesiones of Spain in a controversial 75-year lease of the 157-mile Indiana Toll Road.
Sal Costello, the leading opponent of toll road projects as head of the Texas To... (more)
LONDON, January 28 (IranMania) - Iran has condemned the order by US President George W Bush allowing US military to capture or kill Iranian agents operating inside neighbouring Iraq, terming it a 'terrorist act'.
'I really hope that this report is wrong as such an order is a clear terrorist act and against all internationally acknowledged norms,' the head of the parliament's foreign policy and security commission, Alaeddin Boroujerdi told Fars news agency Saturday.
CHAPEL HILL - Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, who toured the country last fall talking about other people's homes, is now fielding questions about his own $6 million estate outside Chapel Hill.
Edwards had hit the talk show circuit to promote his book "Home: The Blueprints of Our Lives," which describes the childhood homes of various more-or-less famous people, including his own modest mill village houses.
But since he announced his second run for th... (more)
Russia said yesterday it was not willing to hand over to Britain the businessman suspected by Scotland Yard of poisoning the former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko.
Russian prosecutors said there was virtually no prospect they would agree to any future British request for Andrei Lugovoi to be extradited to the UK to stand trial.
Senior Whitehall officials have told the Guardian that a Scotland Yard file on Mr Litvinenko's murder, which is abo... (more)
Low levels of chlorine in tap water used for bathing can almost double the risk of bladder cancer, a study claims.
Scientists found chemical by-products from mains water containing the disinfectant can be absorbed through the skin in the bath or shower and accumulate in the bladder.
Swimming in public pools can also present a risk because chlorine levels are much higher.
The risk is caused by chemical by-products called THMs which are produced when ch... (more)
Women in southern Sweden will in the future not be able to choose the sex of their gynaecologist. Allowing them to choose discriminates against male gynaecologists, it has been ruled.
The new practice has been introduced by clinics in the counties of Skåne, Halland, Blekinge and Kronoberg. Gynaecological patients in those areas will now be assigned a doctor of either sex, Helsingborgs Dagblad reports.
Exceptions will be made in some cases, such as for women wh... (more)
MEN are turning to cosmetic surgery to tackle the embarrassment of “man breasts”, fuelling a near doubling in the number of people sculpting their bodies through liposuction.
Surgeons have reported a surge in the number of men requesting breast-reduction operations for ‘moobs’. According to one theory, the condition, called gynaecomastia, may be caused by an excess of female hormones in tap water.
The boom in demand for liposuction is reveale... (more)
MILAN, Italy -- Italy's top criminal court has ruled that downloading music, movies and software over the Internet isn't a crime if profit wasn't the motivation, though analysts questioned Monday whether the ruling would have much effect on copyright laws.
The court's decision, issued earlier this month but reported over the weekend by the Italian media, overturns earlier convictions against two former Turin Polytechnic Institute students who set up in 1994 a peer-to-peer, file-s... (more)
Bush and Cheney have less than two years to go in their current role and want to go down in the history books as the heroes of the Pax Americana, as the men who managed to conquer the Middle East and its oil, as the men who took full-spectrum dominance seriously, while in their own country booking successes through exorbitant profits for the military-industrial complex and the realization of radical l... (more)
